Customer call centers, or simply, “call centers,” are often the first point of contact for customers seeking direct assistance from manufacturers and service vendors. Call centers provide customer support and problem resolution and are reachable by telephone, including data network-based telephone services, such as Voice-Over-Internet (VoIP), or via Web applications that allows customers to make calls or contact the call centers through chat, e-mail, or other text-based communication techniques.
Agents of a call center are trained to assist customers with particular needs. These agents are generally not aware of ongoing events that the customers are affected by, interested in, or that in some other way relate to the customers unless the customers notify the agents of the events. With myriads of potentially notable events happening every day, ranging from elections to thunderstorms to an opening of local film festivals, conventional call centers fail to track the events, losing the opportunity to decrease call times by anticipating events that are relevant to a reason for a customer's call. As a result, when multiple customers contact a call center because of the same event, multiple call center agents must find out the reason for each customer's communication and address the questions and concerns of each customer one at a time. As the number of customers contacting the call center because of the same event increases, the efficiency of the call center decreases as the agents must repetitively spend time addressing identical concerns of a multitude of customers. The efficiency further decreases as agents who have not been previously exposed to customers calling about an event must take time to learn about the customers' concerns, the same concerns that were previously addressed by other agents for other customers who called about the event.
Despite these problems, conventional call centers tend to gather information about events relating to a customer only after the customer contacts the call center. For example, such call centers may ask the customer to input information by choosing options from a presented menu, with a live agent collecting additional information if necessary. This approach ignores information regarding the events related to the customers that is available from other sources. For example, social media, web pages that allow posting of user-generated content, often has information regarding events directly from the people involved in these events. With the widespread use of mobile devices that allow almost-instantaneous Internet access, user-generated information regarding a particular event often becomes available in social media minutes after the events occurs. Despite the availability of this information, the information generally remains unknown to call centers.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method that allow a call center to detect events related to the call center's customers or other users associated with the call center before the users contact the call center, and to improve the call center's efficiency and increase customer satisfaction using this knowledge.